Friday, April 06, 2012

Good Friday: '“There Is No Possibility of a Smooth Evolution Here”: An Atheist’s Good Friday Sermon'

From Terry Eagleton’s lecture series, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, in which Eagleton criticizes the approach of new atheists Richard Dawkins and Hitch (God rest his soul), or “Ditchkins,” as Eagleton calls them. Raised a Catholic and currently finding it “hard to say” what his current stand is on matters of faith, Eagleton’s primary interest lies in mining Christian theology for insights valuable to the Marxist. But along the way he demonstrates an understanding of the Christian Gospel better than many of those coming from a pulpit:

“Raising of Lazarus,” Guercino

[F]or Christian teaching, God’s love and forgiveness are ruthlessly unforgiving powers which break violently into our protective, self-rationalizing little sphere, smashing our sentimental illusions and turning our world brutally upside down. In Jesus, the law is revealed to be the law of love and mercy, and God not some Blakean Nobodaddy but a helpless, vulnerable animal. It is the flayed and bloody scapegoat of Calvary that is now the true signifier of the law. . .

Here, then, is your pie in the sky or opium of the people, your soft-eyed consolation and pale-cheeked piety. Here is the fantasy and escapism that the hard-headed secularist pragmatist finds so distasteful. Freud saw religion as the mitigation of the harshness of the human condition; but it would surely be at least as plausible to claim that what we call reality is a mitigation of the Gospel’s ruthless demands, which include such agreeable acts of escapism as being ready to lay down your life for a total stranger. Imitating Jesus means imitating his death as well as his life, since the two are not finally distinguishable. The death is the consummation of the life, the place where the ultimate meaning of Jesus’s self-giving is revealed. . . .

What is at stake here is not a prudently reformist project of pouring new wine into old bottles, but an avant-gardist epiphany of the absolutely new—of a regime so revolutionary as to surpass all image and utterance, a reign of justice and fellowship which for the Gospel writers is even now striking into this bankrupt, dépassé, washed-up world. . . . The coming of the kingdom involves not a change of government, but a turbulent passage through death, nothingness, madness, loss and futility. . . signified among other things by Christ’s descent into hell after his death. There is no possibility of a smooth evolution here. Given the twisted state of the world, self-fulfillment can ultimately come about only through self-divestment.